Naval Weapons Station Yorktown (Navy Mine Depot, Yorktown)

Naval Weapons Station Yorktown is a United States Navy ordnance installation on the York River in the Hampton Roads region of Virginia, spanning parts of York County, James City County and Newport News, and bordering the cities of Newport News and Williamsburg. It provides weapons and ammunition storage, assembly, testing and loading for ships of the Atlantic Fleet, and subsequently for United States Fleet Forces Command. The station complex, including Cheatham Annex, covers about 108.5 square miles, roughly a fifth of the land area of York County, and shares some 14 miles of York River shoreline with the National Park Service. It is bounded on the northwest by Cheatham Annex, the Virginia Emergency Fuel Farm and Department of the Interior land, on the southwest by Route 143 and Interstate 64, and on the southeast by Route 238 and the community of Lackey. Camp Peary lies adjacent on the northern side of the Virginia Peninsula.

The station and its tenant commands furnish ordnance logistics, technical and supply services to Fleet Forces Command and its ships. It functions as one of the Navy's explosive-handling corridors to the sea, with supply, amphibious and combatant ships loading and discharging ordnance at its piers. Around 25 tenant commands are hosted, among them Navy Munitions Command Atlantic, the Naval Ophthalmic Support and Training Activity, a Marine Corps Security Force Regiment antiterrorism security team assigned to Second Fleet, the NAVSUP Fleet Logistics Center Norfolk detachment, Navy Expeditionary Medical Support Command, Navy Expeditionary Logistics Support Group, Navy Cargo Handling Battalion One, Riverine Squadron Three and Maritime Civil Affairs Squadron Two. The station is commanded by a Navy captain and access is limited.

Site selection reflected proximity to the Naval Operating Base at Hampton Roads, the Norfolk Navy Yard and the fuel bases of the Fifth Naval District, together with rail access on the Chesapeake and Ohio main line, which forms one boundary of the reservation, and deep-water frontage on the navigable York River able to take ocean-going vessels of the largest dimension and draft.

The Navy acquired the site, a former DuPont dynamite plant property near Penniman, by presidential proclamation in August 1918 to establish the Navy Mine Depot, Yorktown, which stored, assembled, loaded, tested and issued mines for the North Sea Mine Barrage and trained personnel to operate them; the Bureau of Ordnance took possession a month later. Successive expansion converted the depot into a general ordnance station supporting the Atlantic Fleet. Cheatham Annex, acquired by the Navy on 21 June 1943 and formerly part of the Fleet Industrial Supply Center, Norfolk, was incorporated into the station on 1 October 1998 under Mid-Atlantic installation consolidation.